Boy Do I Love Sweating
by honezuki
Summary: Just when Chell thinks she's free to wash her hands of Aperture, GLaDOS regurgitates the smelly human result of their final revenge straight into her lap. M for language now, also for more interesting sins in the future.
1. Chapter 1

BOY DO I LOVE SWEATING: 1.

Now I am a man of constant sorrow,  
>And I know that I've taken all the love I could borrow.<br>And I've seen days of golden suns,  
>But they changed.<br>Now I believe in the villain, I believe in the thief  
>Who steals what he is given, holds it in his teeth.<br>- "The Villain" Birds & Batteries

* * *

><p>For a second all Chell can do is stand there, totally blank. Eyes wide and unfocused, unprocessing. Her jaw doesn't drop – this isn't a surprise, it's just too much. These colors. Dirt under her bare toes. The breeze through the wheat is a lullaby that washes through her and leaves her insensible. Sunlight warms her hair. Sunlight.<p>

_Hard light bridges_, says a tiny voice in the back of her mind, and the moment of sensory oblivion is over as suddenly as it began.

_This is all a clever mechanical panorama. The sky is blue panels. The breeze is from an apparatus vent, the pressure differences between portals, a massive cooling fan turning somewhere. Take a step into the wheat and you'll find the hidden aerial faith plates._ Her back hits the door of the shed, its handle jabbing into her spine. All the sunlight and the colors are getting screechy and heavy in her mind. She takes a long gulp of air then and shuts her eyes tight against the bombardment. _No, this is good, this is fine, this is real. It's over._

_No more fighting. No more tricks. You don't have to think like this anymore._

That may not be entirely true, she concedes to herself. Some other fight may lie in wait, some new opponent, be it man, nature, diabolical robot overlord, or her own post-traumatic stress. But for now...

Daring to open her eyes again (it's all still there, thank God, field and sky), she slides down into a seated position against the shed. She looks at her naked hands and feet, feeling stupid and lost without the portal device. It feels incredible to sit perfectly still, even if she can't shake the feeling of nerves crawling impatiently under her skin, telling her to run run run. She wills her brain to turn off again so it can flood up with pure dumb tranquility, like it did a minute ago, but it does not comply.

Crickets serenade her. _Not turrets anymore, because no turrets ever again._

She'll keep holding still, she decides, to let her heart stop hammering and her rigid muscles relax, but it won't do to abandon her survivalist mindset entirely. She doesn't know what year it is or who the hell might be around, if anyone. This is a cultivated field; no crop grows so neatly and uniformly of its own accord.

_GLaDOS said she saw humans on the surface._ She cannot brush the thought away, as she usually does with all the dubious information GLaDOS gives her. Gave her.

Of all the hypothetical horrors in store for her, the thought of other humans makes Chell's blood run the coldest of all. She does not know if she can speak to another human, or more precisely, if she can explain anything, or if she wants to explain anything, or if there are words to explain, or if there is anything to explain.

She presses the heels of her hands into her eyes, sighing.

She cannot, in fact, remember having looked another human in the eyes. Her first clear memory is of emerging from a weird sleepwalking torpor in the relaxation chamber, finding herself already on her feet, standing with the door flung open and a blue light in her face (_don't even think of that voice, don't think about it_). Every hazy fragment before that… is a strain. She'd gathered them up and counted them in the dim silence of Aperture Science's 1950s testing lobby, as she paused to sit and rest and wonder if she was going to die here, finally, miles underground.

Her first trek through Aperture and the subsequent cryosleep come back as a confusing flick of images like an old nightmare. The same phrase of classical music over and over. A hot ventilation shaft full of cans. The moment she had panicked at a swift orange movement among the shadowed pistons, only to realize it was her reflection. Total black dreamlessness, and the feeling that some vital part of her was being drained away...

The only thing she remembers with total clarity is the moment she came half-awake in the parking lot, surrounded by burning bits of machinery, just before she was unceremoniously escorted back into the facility: the sensation of hot, gravelly asphalt against her cheek and a snatch of birdsong in the open air. It had felt like she'd broken every bone in her body, but the sense of savage triumph burning in her throat had eclipsed the pain. This is both her favorite and most hated memory.

Of life before the testing track, there is even less, and it veers into dangerous territory, almost making her perversely glad that she can't remember it. Almost.

She knows she came to Aperture of her own volition, coerced by nothing but her own cowardice.

She knows she won first place in a science fair a long time ago. (Or did she make this one up?)

She remembers her throat closing up during her intake interview.

And she remembers when her father died.

Something is touching her face, bringing her back to the field: a gnat bumbling gently against her cheek. She is about to be enveloped in an entire cloud of gnats. As she ducks under them and dodges away on her knees, Chell finds herself smiling. It makes her face feel better. In fact, it makes all of her feel better. Gnats. _Who else in the world has ever been this grateful to see a cloud of gnats?_ An unhealthy-sounding wheeze, the first sound she has made for an eternity, escapes her lips, startling her. _I'm laughing._ The realization makes her laugh harder and the wheeze grows, beginning to resemble a proper laugh. And then, throwing her head back as if to let the sun thaw her throat, she croaks out one single, halting, atrociously unmodulated question: "W–why am I so bad at laughing?"

Just as she's about to succumb to hysterics at the grotesqueness of her own voice, she hears a sound from inside the shed behind her and she's on her feet, blood frozen.

The sound is a voice, a human voice, a distant voice, an endless wail, getting louder, getting closer. She stares.

"No." Her second sentence in known history, whispered, and her third. "No." _Any voice but that voice. This isn't happening, I'm outside, I'm done, it was over, it needs to _stay_ over. Run away into this field right now and pretend you never heard anything—_

There's no time to run. She can't coax any of her muscles into action anyway. Her body seems to have independently decided on fight over flight. She hasn't moved an inch when the shed door erupts open with a tremendous BANG and the wail at full volume changes direction into a sharp "OW!", setting her teeth on edge. And here he is, tumbling out with a charred Companion Cube just slipping out of his grasp. Chell's eyebrows go up. A Companion Cube! As the door slams, his manic, unfocused eyes settle on her and his mouth opens in surprise just before he tips all the way over the Companion Cube and faceplants in the hard scrabbly dirt just outside the shed.

Wheatley. Man-Wheatley.

Their eyes meet briefly as Man-Wheatley fights to catch his breath, scrambling to his knees. Chell glares, unable to keep from shaking, her throat back in knots. His gaze quickly darts down again. He hasn't regained enough composure to give her any kind of expression except the shifty eyes. Unsurprising, given the circumstances of this reunion. She is too frightened and too pissed to volunteer anything. So she waits, glaring, to see which of them cracks first, to see if he comes out with an apology, to see if she will haul him to his feet and punch him or just turn and leave him here… if only she could move, if only she could stop shaking.

_What is GLaDOS thinking, or Caroline, or whoever the hell? Whose idea of a joke is _this_? What does she expect me to do with _this_? What happened to the detailed revenge plan, the room where all the robots scream at you? _This_ is not the human I am so petrified to meet. _This_ is not a human._

With mild interest she notices the details of his body's appearance for the first time really: boringly tall, wiry limbs, hair a cowlicked mass of an indecisive dark-blondish color, and the most infuriating giant hangdog eyebrows which she can tell he is going to begin waggling any moment and never stop. Even as a human, he is the least intimidating robot overlord she has ever seen. His long feet are bare. He wears an orange jumpsuit just like hers, only much cleaner, though his face and hands are almost as dirty as the Companion Cube. Then she can't stop looking at the Companion Cube, fingers itching.

_This must be the longest he's ever gone without speaking. Any time now._

His head ducks lower and lower, almost like he's falling asleep, but instead of evening out, his breath becomes increasingly ragged. Getting impatient, she manages to take one step toward him and reaches for the Companion Cube.

She doesn't even realize he's crying until his hands suddenly come up, big knuckles crushed to his forehead. Kicking the Companion Cube at her clumsily, like a child, he crumples into a sobbing heap. She grabs the Companion Cube, running her fingers over its smooth rounded edges, and her glare hardens. What foolishness is this?

He finally looks up and meets her gaze, his wet filthy face screwed up with contempt, and the bellowing begins, tearing his throat raw.

"This is disgusting! Utterly disgusting! Leaking everywhere! I—I can't even see out of this stupid oily piece of shit body! _How could you do this to me?_" he screams, clawing at the jumpsuit. Chell flinches away from the violent gesture, seeing bombs and mashy spike plates.

He seems to seize upon this crack in her show of defense; he leans forward, sizing her up, his voice lower and more dangerous through the hoarse fog of tears. "So how are you going to fix this? Do you even understand? This is the _worst_ thing that could happen."

_The worst thing that could happen. _She ices over at those words, staring directly into his eyes, lips pressed together, daring him to elaborate. _The worst thing that could happen._

Man-Wheatley stares back, eyes dimming. He appears to lose steam all at once. His face slackens, looking suddenly half-dead, drained and terrified.

He throws himself down onto his back, new arms spread in the sun, with a dramatic moan followed by continued mumbling. Chell catches the phrase "_I'm going to die_". Nauseated, she watches his incapacitated figure as he opens and closes his eyes, crying himself out. His eyes are blue, pale, burnt-out blue. She sits down on the edge of the Companion Cube and hugs her knees to keep the trembling at bay.

As if her own fear wasn't enough, she feels saddled with his fear now, too. _Two humans, one a machine, trapped in a field, trapped in bodies, afraid of humans. A joke GLaDOS would like._ She had never considered that it might turn out like this, back when she and GLaDOS, working their way up through the bowels of the facility, had come face to face with a hatch stamped with _Mandatory Employee Intelligence Transfer Relaxation Crypt_.

* * *

><p>"Go back and look at that hatch one more time."<p>

Chell had already examined the hatch twice, at GLaDOS's behest, and backtracked around the corner to look for other paths twice, also at GLaDOS's behest. No way to budge the big handle widget, even with her foot braced against the door for leverage, even with both feet. No manual override procedure, or indeed any buttons of any kind. No way to proceed, no way back, and nary a portalable surface in sight.

Her brain twanged. _No sleep. No fucking adrenal vapor._ The tang of oil permeating the test shaft had grown unbearable a long time ago, and the occasional whiff of cold antiseptic air convinced her that they were literally close enough to smell the modern enrichment center. She approached the door and pressed her palms against the rusted metal in vain, fervently imagining an elevator humming quietly on the other side. A security camera was bolted to the wall at eye level next to her; its blunt head swiveled lazily to track her movement.

"Are you sure you're trying hard enough to open this thing?" demanded GLaDOS. "Put your weight into it."

Chell waited for the fat joke. None came. Emitting an exaggerated sigh through her nose, she threw her arms up in a shrug.

The camera whirred as if zooming in on her and the lock disengaged with a sudden deafening clang. Startled, she leaped back, banging into the catwalk rail. "OHMYGOD," chirped the potato as the portal device lurched. "What did you do?" They watched as the hatch shuddered, its spoke-handle turning, then groaned open, revealing a shadowy passage beyond which Chell could see the interior of a starkly-lit room.

"Was that a motion sensor?" wondered GLaDOS. "But it should have picked you up from the beginning…"

Paying no attention, Chell barged straight through. She was greeted by the familiar sight of blank monitors, overturned computer chairs, and abandoned coffee mugs, arranged into an untidy ring of work stations around one large central switchboard. Reinforced glass windows along the curving walls looked into a number of dark chambers, each accessible through another menacing vault door. It appeared to be a sort of control annex.

As she cast about for another exit, several of the ubiquitous Aperture warning signs caught her eye.

"WARNING: IN CASE OF ZOMBIE ATTACK, rouse and release crypt occupants as a vital distraction."

"Notice: Crypt occupants are in barbiturate-induced comas, not trances. Aperture Science asks you to disregard any prophecies they attempt to make." And a scrawled note taped under that: "Please do not conduct seances in relaxation chambers!"

"Remember: Keep a tranquilizer gun by your bedside in case you awaken with a crypt occupant standing over your bed, watching you sleep."

Something about this seemed more ominous than usual, if that was even possible. Were actual humans asleep in these relaxation chambers? She peered into one of the windows but could discern very little beyond the frosted glass, just a smear of greenish ambient light. Turning to the vault door, she braced one foot against it, clenched her jaw, and gave the handle a wrench – but it opened easily, noiselessly…

"_Stop_."

She faltered in the doorway, unsettled by the razor edge running through GLaDOS's single word of admonition. The two of them remained in the doorway, looking in. The light streaming from behind illuminated rows of weedy scientist bodies, each suspended in a complex automated pod of gelatinous green.

"Do not, under any circumstances, enter this chamber."

_Mandatory… Employee Intelligence Transfer… Relaxation Crypt. Oh._

Chell couldn't believe it had taken her so long to realize what this place was. Whom it might hold. Why GLaDOS, usually so flippant, might suddenly sound tightly controlled, _breathless_ almost, and why she might not want to look any closer. That was okay with Chell; she had no more desire than GLaDOS to confront the half-alive victims of Aperture's experiments. After a moment, she stepped back, shut the door, and turned around, but the chamber stayed in her mind: the dead sterile air, all the watery lights and darknesses running over the marble-still contours of those vacant faces…

She moved among the other vault doors to the largest one, labeled TO MAIN LIFT SHAFT, but GLaDOS spoke again. "Wait a minute. Take a look at that switchboard in the center. Is there a way we can move these subjects to the extended relaxation center, or even to individual vaults? I might want to… get a better look at them. Just to determine if they'll be useful at all. If they've been put into induced comas, a few of them may have escaped brain damage," she noted parenthetically.

Well.

If GLaDOS wanted to look her past life in the eye, wanted to relive things perhaps best left forgotten, wanted to walk that dark precarious path littered with unseen failures, traumas, heartaches, and other such nightmarishness… that was her business.

Besides, Chell knew which path _she'd_ choose, if she ever had the luxury.

The big red button on the console was hard to miss: "Add Crypt Occupants to Testing Queue (Warning! Only press if and when intracranial hypertension has completely subsided!)" She made a melodramatic face and pummeled it with a balled-up fist, an unsubtle motion for an unsubtle button, then quickly turned on her heel and left for the lift shaft as buzzers and flashing lights began activating inside the chambers.

_Maybe someday she'll return the favor._

* * *

><p>She could tell GLaDOS was still preoccupied with the contents of the relaxation crypt, but not for the obvious reasons. As they portaled and slid and bounced their way up the rest of the test shaft in increasingly large bounds, GLaDOS mused about the merits of having a batch of humans in the facility again.<p>

In the lift shaft: "I wonder if those sadsack employee popsicles were vitrified properly. Were those chambers even up to code? If there's tissue damage, they won't be viable organ donors. Well, I guess if even so much as a kidney survived, they'll be worth having around."

In the vertiginous climb over the gel pipes, with conversion gel slopping every which way through the ventilation duct behind them: "What percentage of those popsicles do you think were the result of a successful intelligence transfer experiment? And what percentage were just contused into oblivion? I'll bet it was ninety-five to five. Still, science."

In the pneumatic elevator on the way back up at last: "Hang on. If Aperture developed artificial intelligence in tandem with human brain mapping, and if I— if Caroline— …if _that_ experiment was a success, what about all those _other_ subjects? And what about all the… Ugh. That would explain a lot. Look, just find the moron, I need to do some more thinking."

None of this was heading in a pleasant direction, but Chell happened to have other, more pressing problems. As they emerged into the enrichment center, all at once she was acutely aware of the changeable nature of the facility, and of the fact that it was now under the control of a personality construct designed to make poor decisions, and of the severe disadvantage she and GLaDOS faced as they entered his strange new territory. The enrichment center itself felt different, seeming to breathe down her neck more than ever as she slipped along the catwalk.

Then, without warning, his furious voice rang out all around them.

"For God's sake, you're _boxes_ with _legs_!"

The sound sent a bloodless shudder rolling up her skin. GLaDOS practically snarled. As he ranted on about nothing comprehensible, Chell ducked cringing down the catwalk and toward an open office, her heart racing; she hadn't dreamed they would encounter him this quickly. _Be cool, Chell._ Through the observation window they saw a chamber full of hybrid cube-turret critters hobbling aimlessly around a button without touching it, while Wheatley's gigantic image berated them from upon a monitor the height of the room. She raised an eyebrow at the sight of that ridiculous monitor. _How incredibly typical. _

GLaDOS had a plan: "Paradoxes," she had breathed back in the control room of the abandonment hatch, and Chell had heard a quick smile full of sharp teeth in her voice. "No A.I. can resist thinking about them!"

Once they'd managed to portal inside the chamber, Chell hoisted one of the frankenturret monstrosities onto the button quickly, not letting herself think about the fate of the floor where she stood if the A.I. holding it up were to suddenly fry to death. The blank monitor snapped back to life and once again Wheatley's bright eye regarded her from under its smugly hooded plates. She drew herself up and looked daggers into the blue beam, determined not to betray the panic fluttering in her chest.

The boxes-with-legs shorted out under the force of GLaDOS's paradox, but Wheatley, unfortunately, did not.

"It just goes to show you…" said GLaDOS in a grim undertone. "There's a certain degree of idiocy that can't be programmed, you know."

And with that enigmatic observation, it was back to the testing track.

* * *

><p>As they breezed through his pathetic first test and began the more difficult ones, Chell could hear gears turning and circuits closing in GLaDOS's mind. She whispered maddening hints to Chell in the elevators between tests, refusing to explain herself further but sounding wickeder every time. Chell hated GLaDOS's gradual descent into chirpiness more than anything else in the new testing track – it was enough having <em>one<em> A.I. heckle her mercilessly in a convincingly human vocal inflection.

Despite her attempts at caginess, it was obvious GLaDOS believed that the intelligence dampening sphere, like her, had originated from a human, and that his human body was among those vitrified in the Intelligence Transfer Relaxation Crypt. How this information might congeal into an actual plan, though, was anyone's guess.

After the adrenaline surge of finding Wheatley again, Chell wilted, hauling her trembling limbs through the tests. The portal device on her arm weighed a million pounds. The stench of oil wouldn't leave her hair, and now it competed with the foreboding scorched smell of Wheatley ruining various chunks of the facility. At least he wasn't actively trying to do her in – he seemed content with the rounds of merciless heckling. In between, he watched her like a hawk as she worked, his blue gaze inscrutable, glancing occasionally at the decisive button.

The knowledge that he was watching made her even more jittery, aware of her own surfaces and chamber surfaces and the tense electric air moving between them, the difference between her and everything else. The sensation of her disheveled hair floating in that staticky gap. No matter where she stood in each chamber, she felt the exact angle to his stupid exhibitionist monitor screen. Maybe she couldn't expect him not to engage in the practice of looking, having been structurally conceived as one big eyeball, but wasn't there _anything_ that might require his attention? A nuclear meltdown, maybe? Not even the button? No, his eyes darted to the button but returned to her. She wanted to close like a flower at night, fold up her hair and put it away. She retied her ponytail, holding the portal device under one arm and looking back at his impassive image. _If he were a human, at least I could knee him in the balls._

GLaDOS harped in her ear about his increasing immunity to the testing euphoria, but she was too busy trying not to fall into a pit and die to really worry about it. He still hadn't found the humans from the crypt, so he needed her. What could he do except make more tests? Better exasperated outbursts than the pornographic moaning and optic-rolling of the early chambers…

Or so she'd figured, anyway, until he dropped her between tests.

She trusted her boots to handle falls of much greater magnitude, but that didn't make crashing through a ceiling any less terrifying. As the shock of landing rattled up her bones and debris spilled into the office around them, GLaDOS was already hissing: "Listen to me, this is what we're going to do." Wheatley's panicky chatter came echoing through the ruined ceiling from a distance, but she spoke over him in a quick, resolute whisper close to Chell's ear. "If I'm right, there should be a way to reverse the intelligence transfer procedure and put him back into his proto-moron human body. Of course, that's if we can find it. And if it isn't damaged beyond use. And if it was even in that crypt. And if he even came from a body. But if we can complete that procedure and sever the connection with his core-self, you'll be able to just rip it right out of my body, and there'll be _nothing_ he can do about it – _plus_ he'll be trapped in a smelly human body, and who wants that? Nobody. It'll be a living hell. Anyway, it isn't any better than my paradox idea, but as you haven't come up with anything, I am officially declaring it Plan B. And the ultimate revenge part is a nice bonus, isn't it? Let's go."

Her monologue finished, the potato fell silent again.

Chell just stared. This was the masterstroke GLaDOS had been cackling about in every elevator? Somehow she doubted transferring Wheatley to a human body actually constituted a fate worse than death, if it could even be done. Still, as GLaDOS had said, nobody had any better ideas.

It turned out Plan B couldn't have come a moment sooner: as soon as she reached the testing track again, Wheatley went all shifty, blathering on about some surprise they were going TO DIE FOR, if you caught his drift, _bwahahaha_. In a way, this sudden bout of fiendish moustache-twirling proved to be a boon of sorts, because when he finally flung her sideways into a spiky-plate ambush, she found she wasn't surprised at all. She just gave his monitor her most expressive "I'm-judging-you" face and then portaled away, leaving him wailing at her to come back.

* * *

><p>"I might throw in a few years in the room I built where all the robots scream at you," said GLaDOS in a conversational tone, "but all in all, if we can get this human thing to work, I'll— wait!" They had just reached another dark office filled with the feeble glow of computer screens. "Can you use these computers?"<p>

Chell thought her talents lay more in the realm of breaking computers than of using them, all things considered, but she nudged at a mouse and jabbed some buttons. Nothing.

"Too bad. I thought maybe we could look that human up in the queue. If we can get to a core input receptacle, I'll be able to find him. Probably. Unless the moron came up with a _really_ good password. Then again, how likely is that? Just keep doing whatever you're doing and get us there alive."

There really was nothing else to say on the matter, and she didn't mention it again as Chell continued dodging her way through a series of ineffective death traps. When at last she dragged her deadened legs up to the base of his lair in GLaDOS's old chamber, now crumbling under the strain of Wheatley's utter ineptitude, she thought GLaDOS was going to short herself out with excitement. She located the core input receptacle and stabbed the potato unceremoniously into it.

After a moment GLaDOS sang, "I found it! We're in business! Huh… a lot of this information is redacted, but it's definitely him. Subject #848, Intelligence Dampening Sphere, it's got his intake interview here. Ho ho… and vitrified 1990. He'll be a bit rusty, but it looks like there's no permanent damage. Now I just have to get the thing up here."

The defective cores they'd spotted on the way in would serve as a distraction; in his corruption he would become more vulnerable to the transfer, less able to function, to resist. "He's certainly not going to like it, so be prepared for a hissy fit. Remember, he's no longer the same entity that grew up in that body – he wasn't programmed with any of its memories, just its basic personality framework – not to mince words, its idiocy. So he has no idea how to be human." The potato let out a sinister little chuckle. "I can't wait. In the meantime, give him hell from me."

So Chell went to fight him.

_I am close, so close. I will take off this jumpsuit and bathe and eat fruit and sleep for hours, days, weeks, and I will dream again and then wake up from the dreams. Just one more fight._

This was what it always came down to. The goal was always survival, survival and escape, and to hell with everything else. Maybe once he'd been her stalwart companion, guide, resident expert hacker and teller of waggish jokes, but now they were enemies and she wasn't going to dither about it while the facility collapsed about their ears. In any case, she'd been around artificial intelligences long enough to know that for all their yammering, they were nothing more than gadgets to be dropped into pits, programs to be fried via paradox, gears to be crushed beneath her heel.

Now he taunted her, swaying and swaggering through the air above her, ordering her to lie down and die like a good girl. _This machine is all that stands between me and sky, birdsong, asphalt, victory, _she thought, glaring up at him full-intensity_._ When she slammed the first corrupted core onto his smoking chassis, a jolt of pure grim satisfaction flooded through her – he deserved the most hellish punishment GLaDOS could conceive.

"Yes! The procedure's off to a great start! Okay, watch out below…" came GLaDOS's disembodied voice. Before Chell had time to think, the body emerged from the ceiling encased in its pod and clanked down solidly behind the chassis.

To her surprise, the pod had already been drained of its specimen preservation fluid, and the man inside was standing slumped with his rangy forearms pressed against the glass, though she couldn't tell to what degree he was truly conscious. His hair, dark with the wet of the fluid, lay plastered down his forehead, and his skin was paper-white, nerd-white. He wore what appeared to be compression shorts and a pair of big rounded plastic eyeglasses drooped askew over his nose. _Nice to meet you, proto-moron._

A bundle of wires connecting the base of the body's neck to Wheatley's chassis snapped to and fro as the core reactivated, showering sparks across the room.

"Wh–what have you put onto me? What is that?"

_Oh._ Chell stared, the portal device hanging akimbo. _Oh._ The odd slurred sound of Wheatley's protest had issued not from his core, but from the mouth of the man behind the glass, his eyes still closed and his fists convulsing. The horrible cracking working of his jaw and the fractured quality of his voice sent cold fingers up her spine.

Wheatley fell silent – utterly silent – and looked at her with a trembling, tightly constricted pupil, and she knew the real fight was about to begin. A second later, his shields were repositioned and he was lobbing another round of bombs in her direction, taking advantage of her momentary hesitation. But she hadn't put a hundred turrets out of action to no gain, and her reflexes didn't fail her. As she sprang away and raised the portal device, she forced herself to tune out the twitching human behind her opponent.

His aim became ballistic, firing bombs out lightning-fast in haphazard clusters instead of at one fixed point – because of the added corruption or just out of rage? She tripped around him, trying to place portals whenever he paused. His voice coughed, and she heard him say weakly, "Enough," from inside the pod, and after a few more coughs he was telling her he despised her, he loathed her, he wouldn't have cared if she'd dropped dead two steps out of the relaxation center and he would appreciate it if she'd drop dead now.

_Enough indeed._

Another corrupted core, and the man's eyes flew open, rolling and darting for a moment before they trained on her and then narrowed in time with the nattering abuse pouring from his throat. In the thrashing chassis, Wheatley's blue ocular display floated blankly around the room. One more core, and suddenly the figure was pounding at the glass in a frenzy and Wheatley dangled lifeless but for a few sparks – but no, Chell understood, now the man _was_ Wheatley, all of Wheatley – he ran his fully-functional fingers around and around the pod, searching for a seam or a release trigger – he grimaced at the system announcement asking his authorization to cut the connection and finalize the consciousness transfer: "What do you think?" "Interpreting vague answer as yes!" "NONONONONO!"

With a wrench, she tore her eyes from him in time to see a group of panels unfold and present the stalemate resolution button. She shot one portal, then another, leaping through to the button at a full sprint, not stopping to wonder why the man's face split into a triumphant grin as she passed him, and then of course— BANG.

The next thing she knew, she was on her back, half blinded and deafened with a sudden stabbing headache. As she fought to breathe, the only thing she could register was the uppermost part of the pod toppling out of her range of vision, followed by a startling crash as it shattered apart.

"OW FUCK IT." She managed to turn her head and saw the man's bloody hands clutching at one of his bare feet, the other hopping around her orange portal to escape the radius of the broken glass; then she blinked the daze from her eyes and he was standing directly above her, silhouetted against the bare ceiling light. His expression was veiled behind the glare of his crooked eyeglasses.

"Wha_—_ are you still alive?" he said, sounding indignant. "You are joking. You have _got_ to be kidding me."

An unexpected quaver went through Chell at the terrifying proximity of his voice, the immediacy of it – that familiar voice emitted through moving lips by hoarse vocal cords.

Clenching her jaw, she seized the portal device lying next to her with bruised, aching arms and pointed it at him instinctively, provoking a savage giggle from him.

"Oh, what are you gonna do with that, love? Nothing, that's what. You think you've got me beat with your stupid dirty trick, do you? You've just signed your own… death… certificate. With, er, your cold dead hand. I'm still in control—" with one unsteady hand, he grabbed a bunch of the cables leading out of the back of his neck, pointing to them as he leaned over her— "and I have _no_ idea how to fix this place."

The room shook as it crumbled around them. Ceiling panels came crashing down in cascades.

"You _had_ to play bloody cat and mouse, didn't you?"

But Chell wasn't listening to his tirade any more after that: she was feeling a rush of air tasting miraculously of green and dirt and night, and she was seeing the moon glinting over his shoulder (_how long have we been this close, this absurdly, impossibly close to the surface?_), the idea was in her mind (_and how deranged am I, how crazy have I gone running around like a rat in a maze, to even consider this—this lunacy?_) and she shifted her aim and fired—

* * *

><p><strong><em>Whew<em>, cliffhanger! What could she be doing with the moon? Har har har. I haven't written fiction of any kind for 6 years, so please give me constructive criticism! Tear me apart!**

**Note: On September 5 I replaced the original chapter one, first posted August 20, with this majorly edited version. Sorry about that. I let my excitement for the project get the best of me and made the extremely noob mistake of publishing the chapter waaaaay before I was totally satisfied with it. If you're curious, the original version wasn't that different, just much shorter and crappier.  
><strong>**Second Note: SPOILER ALERT, THERE'S GONNA BE SOME SEX IN THIS STORY SOMEDAY. Just a warning to anyone who's not into smut. I expect it'll be quite slow going, though.**


	2. Chapter 2

**Helloooo! First of all, before you read, I have a confession to make… I owe you a huge apology. This is set to be the most awkward giant update ever. As I'm posting this on September 5, I am also replacing the original chapter one, first posted August 20, with a majorly edited version. I posted that first chapter in the middle of the night in what was obviously a fit of madness, and when I looked at it again the next morning, it was clear the thing I'd posted was a decent rough draft, but not a finished piece and definitely not something that needed to see the light of day. The new version is almost twice as long, so you probably want to have a look at it before you tackle this one.**

**I might be a huge fanfic noob, but I'm pretty sure this is terrible author etiquette. Rest assured it's not a mistake I'll make again.**

**Anyway. Onward to business! I can't give enough thanks to everyone who wrote me a review. This next section ended up going on forever, so I've split it into a two-parter. This one starts out a bit freaky. Just dive right in and it'll sort itself out, I promise. And er, if you find it incomprehensible after all, tell me. In a review.**

* * *

><p>BOY DO I LOVE SWEATING: 2.<p>

Blue lips, blue veins.  
>Blue, the color of our planet from far, far away.<br>Blue,  
>The most human color.<br>- "Blue Lips" Regina Spektor

* * *

><p><em>I'M STILL IN CHARGE AND I HAVE NO IDEA HOW TO FIX THIS.<em>

_She's got the device trained on him like she's going to place a portal in his face, ha, the soft face full of teeth, and he moves the arms like they're suspended on wires just long massive arms into nowhere, into space. He can't hear the space voice anymore thank god or the other ones either, hearing is different right now and cupped and curved in three dimensions, but still the buzz and the itch like a neverending saw. The human's brief pictures are gone too the ones that said "this is a fruit fly genome" or "this is how you crash a bike" or "the woman you love bare breasts crying and yelling" or "glasses snapping under a cleat and laughter as you boil over". Nonsense. They are full of tricks these two. He is small and bleeding and weirdly long but in control, stood over her on the bleeding feet so crushable. There's still time oh plenty of time, ha._

_Wait no, there's no time because she ran out the clock stupid little orange lab rat, cockroach, he could have been hacking and he would have had it shut off by now. YOU HAD TO PLAY BLOODY CAT AND MOUSE DIDN'T YOU. What a voice in this body so loud in the ears and he feels it in the chest, but never louder than the buzz and the itch. WHILE PEOPLE WERE TRYING TO WORK YEAH WELL NOW WE'RE ALL GONNA PAY THE PRICE. She's not listening, she's not listening, why does she never listen and why does nobody ever listen. He is in control could have fixed it given just a minute longer. 'CAUSE WE'RE ALL GONNA BLOODY DIE._

_She looks past him as ceiling tiles rattle off, fake ceiling tiles for sure, she moves and her finger swift on the trigger it goes flitting past him blue. No, what?_

_Then from behind, it comes roaring AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGHHH and everything goes flailing, all the parts tugging midair unbelievable suction on every inch and he's upside down over and over, confusing orange, blue until he buckles by the neck. Nothing. Stars. Space. SPACE! It roars but never louder than the buzz and the itch still creeping up the cables at the neck. The slack cables at the neck are just now taut, straining, and her sharp hands closing around the wrists pulling even tighter and he sees her blazing eyes. Parasite cockroach rat dangling off him by the wrists, he wrenches them uselessly in the wind but unable to shake her. Her feet stand on stars. Let her suffocate and die. LET GO WE'RE IN SPACE!_

_Her hands even sharper tighter. Then, flashing like individual film frames in one slow eternity he sees it: he sees the core, he sees himself, the sphere disconnected an empty shell of no color, no blue. It is leaving, it has left in the vacuum of space spiraling, it is far, far away and now he sees it is gone. And wordless rage pours out the mouth. Now what? He is here with the wrists in her grip the only wrists he's ever had. The glasses on his nose leave his nose they're gone too and space blurs out. Other cores rip through and disappear screaming electronic space._

_LET ME GO I CAN PULL MYSELF IN I CAN STILL FIX THIS. His voice distorts in the blast of air into space terrible, why is space this unceasing hell second by second worse and worse? Let it end and the dead weight fly off and he will fix everything just let it end. But then. Her._

_It's Her moving behind him and the back of the neck breaks free with a deafening sound, cables streaming around. The buzz and the itch are ended. Everything flips, pivoting around her small sharp hands, and he sees barely, blindly, inside the portal Her claw seizing tight the jumpsuit leg. Now she is secure and he dangles. Oh god, those tight hands around the wrists of his, her hands are all that stand between him and space, space in a body that freezes and dehydrates and depressurizes and dies. The blazing eyes narrow and again, he sees it: as she gets pulled back in she will let him go. Her hands twitch around the wrists like they want to loosen. He will die. "No no, please, GRAB ME GRAB ME!"_

_Her hands loosen. There in that second, he wants the body after all, six miserable elongated feet of meat to save him from space, and the body is slavishly amenable, it snaps to his command as her hands loosen around him, he makes a wild clasp and closes around her wrists this time, he hangs from her by the power of his hands. Dry-mouthed and triumphant, he smiles at her. "I think that's some muscle memory, love," he breathes at her soundlessly, and they drag inch by inch back through the portal. Granules of darkness scatter around his vision until he can't see her face anymore. His feet are inside and the portal closes, and as his brand-new cheek smacks stupidly against the cold floor, there's nothing else but black._

* * *

><p>"Guess what, moron. It's time to get up."<p>

The first thing Wheatley sees is Her bowed core head right in his face.

"Geah!" he says, thrashing like a fish – everything feels loose and bizarre, and what's happened to his hull? It aches in a way he never though possible, pain eroding straight through his circuits. Is he hanging in pieces?

Her ocular light tapers to a yellow slit and looms even closer. Without warning, a pair of filthy human hands fly up into his line of sight, shoving foolishly in Her direction.

"DAHHHHH! HANDS! Oh… hands. Right."

His lips and tongue curl and thrust over hard little teeth as he speaks. The hands come back down, clench and release and turn. His ugly feet are shoeless. _Still_ in this prank-body? Shit.

"Very good." He hears a chittering from behind and twists his neck to look. (It can turn like a bloody owl's neck, this thing! Repulsive.) His eyes won't focus properly, though, and he can only make out two shuffling white forms against the pitch-black panels that line the room. He guesses it's those testing robots. Little cores nestled into shiny robotic skeletons. If She insists on giving him limbs, why not _that_ kind of limbs?

He ought to be quaking right now, really, prostrate and sore and dangerously squashy on the floor in front of the tremendous computer. He is the traitor who ejected Her from the seat of power, forced Her into a potato battery, punched Her into a bottomless pit, and proceeded to eagerly, systematically destroy Her kingdom; now She hangs heavy like a big, blunt sword of Damacles (electronic bludgeon of Damacles?) over his broken-crowned head. Yet strangely, he can't summon the energy to feel anything but gloom and defeat. His circuits – nerves? – are hollow after the buzz and the itch of the central A.I. chassis. Maybe this body just doesn't do the whole quaking thing. Especially when it's busy feeling beaten half to death. He swallows and opens his flappy mouth again.

"Sorry, I think I've missed something. Why have you—"

"You'll be relieved to know," She cuts him off in a luxurious tone, drawing back until he can only see a white smudge, "I've checked out all your new basic functions. Everything works perfectly. As you fritter away each one of your remaining years on Earth, you'll be able to secrete and excrete all kinds of interesting things, right along with your clammy human pals. It'll be one big vomit party." He feels an alarming prickling on his forehead and back and realizes he's just broken out in a sweat, confirming Her words. "Keep in mind, though, you're not in mint condition. Don't throw out your back. You've already injured it once."

"_I've_ injured—?"

"Interesting science fact for you, by the way: did you know that your personality was built entirely of the dumbest parts of this human's brain map? You can't remember it anymore, but this dope used to be _you_. So that's why I've made this glorious reunion possible for you. Surprise! How do you feel about being back inside the bag of meat where you really belong?"

His jaw drops open of its own accord before he shuts it again with a jarring clack. "Wh— now that's not possible, is it?"

"Oh, but it is." The yellow light twinkles at him, its shape indicating sheer glee. "To celebrate, I want to give you a present. Do you want to guess what the present is?"

"What is the present?" he says hoarsely, mind still playing back Her previous lines, _dumbest parts of this human's brain map, this dope used to be you._

"I'm going to send you up to the surface, to someone who can teach you your first lesson about human survival – someone who already hates every last sweaty pore of your body. Someone who's doubtless the burliest, most cunning and barbaric human in the world, who will almost certainly cut you down on sight like the weed you are. So if you can survive that, you can survive anything."

That gets his attention. He's never visited the surface and now doesn't seem like a good time to start; neither does he particularly fancy being violently disassembled at the hands of some Viking beast of a human. Panic overcomes him and then on reflex, here comes the stalling, words tumbling over each other along the surfaces of his mouth: "Waitwaitwaitwait! How is that a good first lesson? Are you sure you don't want to… keep me here and… put me in a test?" Hearing himself say that, he suddenly sees what a terrible idea it is. Backtrack! "No, no, I've got it: you could put your own technological prowess to the test by putting me back into a shiny new core. Or an old battered one, whichever! And I'm sure you could do it easily, so there we go! Quick, easy validation of your genius! Why not do that? Let's—let's do that."

He stutters out as the curved hull lunges up to his face like a cobra again, silent and wide-eyed.

"You're right, of course. If you really want to stay here, I've got a _lot_ of ideas."

Staring helplessly into Her cold eye as She purrs, he almost doesn't notice the pneumatic tube snaking around from the ceiling to hover over him.

"Unfortunately, you've got a ride to catch. And if you ever come back, I will take you on a _very_ detailed tour of my _very_ favorite parts of the facility before opening your feeble skull, sans anesthetic, and slowly lesioning you into a living soup. Chew on that, you weed."

Squinting up, he cowers in the growing stream of suction from the tube. There's nowhere to run. "No no no, wait—"

"Have fun. Oh, and one more thing – this was all _her_ idea."

_Her _idea?

And with a _ftthpp _sound, he embarks on his second-ever ride through the pipe system. With limbs, it is the opposite of fun. He's a writhing mass of angles, knees and elbows and toes and nose scraping the seams of the tube with every corner. As he passes another perpendicular tributary, something flies out and punches him in the stomach: a blackened Companion Cube? He doubles over it to tuck in all his angles and ends up in a wild gyroscopic spin of the sort he might have enjoyed as a sphere, but which now feels like brain-rattling, gut-churning death.

Squeezing his eyes shut lessens the dizziness and over the rush of air in his ears, his internal monologue pipes up again: _her_ idea, _her_ idea. So it's _her_ fault he's now a fleshy sponge in a suction tube destined straight for hell. All the torture she's put him through just wasn't enough. She never did succeed in killing him, so this is her final fatal campaign. He admits it's the most creative one of all.

The tube straightens out for a long stretch picks up speed. His insides float sickeningly. Before he realizes it he's bawling in terror, one long continuous sound until there's no breath left to sustain it and still it goes on until—

BANG!

"OW!" Pain shoots through the top of his head as it collides with some surface. His feet find ground with a sudden jolt but his noodly legs don't support him. Collapsing, he pitches forward and as if in slow motion the surface gives way, swinging open like a door to reveal a blinding expanse of blue and gold, a smell of _openness_ and _wind _and _heat_ that wrenches his chest in an entirely new way… and in the midst of it he sees _her_.

_She's_ the one that's going to kill him after all.

He manages to stay upright for a second. Then his shins connect with the cube, which has ended up on the ground in the perfect position to send him tripping down nose-first into the hardest, grittiest dirt imaginable. Wincing, he gathers himself up and raises his head to look at her. Yes, that is definitely the face of someone about to kill him. Half of her dark hair has escaped its tie and swarms around her head in a corona of flyaways. Her eyes are wide and savage as she glares down at him, quivering slightly in her murderous passion. He quickly looks down again, not wishing to witness the descent of her tiny sharp fist as it delivers the blow that will cleave his head and end him.

How does it always come down to this? His entire existence has been a comedy of errors, a series of insults and cold shoulders, one long hemming-in and dressing-down, punctuated periodically by everybody trying to kill him. Every time something good has come to him, he's just waited on tenterhooks for the catch, the bolt from the blue that would ruin it all, and the bolt has always come.

And now, the final indignity: dying an animal, beaten down by fate, at the merciless hands of the woman who betrayed him.

Wheatley feels increasingly full of bile and other, unidentifiable liquids. Certain places behind his face, especially his nose, are getting all hot and crammed up like bubbling acid behind a dam. He sees her bare feet moving, changing stance to attack him. In sudden gasping desperation he kicks the cube in her direction, and the next thing he knows, there are fluids pouring out of what seems like every orifice in his head, leaving him completely blind and dumb and defenseless – not that he ever stood a chance against _her_ anyway. Scalding, acrid tears spill into his mouth, which is already filled with the most horrid thick saliva, and there is mucus – _mucus! –_ bubbling in strings inside his nose, and he can't breathe hard enough or fast enough, and it feels like a hot, cracked stone is crumbling in his throat and the pieces are landing hard in his chest.

Unable to stand this physiological onslaught without comment any longer, he hauls his head up defiantly and screams into her smug face: "This is disgusting!"

Oh, wait: she doesn't even look smug, she looks horrified. As she should. This is a pretty gross spectacle; death might be the final indignity, but it can't be much worse than mucus.

"Utterly disgusting, leaking everywhere! I—I can't even see out of this stupid oily piece of shit body! _How could you do this to me?_"

Was she always this small, though? Even as she stands over him glaring for all she's worth, she seems to shrink into herself, and even as his entire frame shudders with every breath, a hope flits into his mind: if he stood up all the way, would he be bigger than her? Could he actually fight in this body? Could he win? She makes for a compact little package, all dangerous eyes and ready posture, like a turret. Maybe get behind her and tip her over?

"So how are you going to fix this?" he snarls, wiping at all the phlegm with the back of one hand. "Do you even understand? This is the worst thing that could happen."

And that's when it happens. She doesn't move, but her eyes change; they remind him of bruises. Then the stabbing sadness in his chest changes, too, into a sadness that feels even worse, something that eats away at him, picking holes in his self-righteous fury until there's nothing left. He feels himself sagging under the weight of her accusatory gaze and suddenly he remembers the similar look she gave him from inside the glass elevator, the look that lanced clear through the storm of his paranoid rage, just for a second.

It's too much, so he just shuts off.

He flops down, cracking his stupid head on the ground again, and succumbs utterly to the agony of sensation, to oblivion and hell and _feelings_.

* * *

><p>Some time later, as he lies in his heap of dirt and jumpsuit and tired bones and dried phlegm, he hears her stand up and her feet pad over. He ignores it and continues to examine his moist, fat palms, creased by a thousand wrinkles, until a shadow falls across him. He sighs and squints up.<p>

She stands over him again, her face unreadable. He arranges his own face into an unimpressed mask and stares back. It's nice to have the sun out of his eyes, anyway. Although he doesn't rule out the possibility that she's about to kill him with a single well-placed stomp, it seems unlikely at this point. For at least an hour she has been sitting on the cube, silent as ever, her back to him – admiring the scenery, he presumes; humans love that kind of thing. Every time he's glanced over, her figure has been relaxed. Slumped, even. If there was a time for killing, it seems that time has passed.

Unfortunately, the alternative to dying in a human body is living in a human body.

While she's been doing… whatever it is she's been doing, Wheatley's been staring into the slow-drifting sky, muttering to himself over the endless whooshing of the wheat, debating the effectiveness of his body's defensive structures in order to distract himself until all the disgusting physical reactions died down. He has come to the conclusion that eyelids and toenails are dumb and has yelled this conclusion to her ("Hey! Eyelids and toenails are dumb! Hear me? Yours too!") without receiving a response. This still seems like a bad dream, but he isn't sure he cares anymore, so now that she's standing over him, seemingly waiting for something, he throws caution to the winds and levels his sarcasm at her.

"Well, now that we've had a quick glare, very productive, was there something you wanted to say to me? Telepathically or otherwise?"

Her eyebrows raise and he almost thinks she's about to crack a smile.

"Why did you do this to me?" he asks quietly.

A transient look of sadness crosses her face. Then she's pressing her lips together and shaking her head, a minuscule movement. She turns on her heel and vanishes from sight. A moment later, he hears her struggling to lift the cube, breathing in soft not-quite-grunts. He sits up, feeling a brief wave of wobbliness at the sudden change of position, and sees her walking into the wheat at a brisk pace, cube braced awkwardly on her hip.

"Wait a second, where are you going don't—!"

The terrified protest slips out before he even knows what he's afraid of. She turns and looks at him, continuing to walk backward without stopping, and although her face becomes more blurred in his vision with every step, he can make out her eyebrows raised again. Raised in expectation? Invitation? On an impulse, he scrambles to his feet and runs after her, feeling the curious swishing of wheat along his legs as he pushes through it. She stops to watch, and then he realizes what's just happened.

"Bloody fucking— do you see this? I can run! Ha ha! And walk too, can't I?" he crows. He walks around her effortlessly, forwards and backwards, laughing in delight. "Doing it properly, no falling!" He was right about the difference in their sizes, he notices: now that they're both standing up straight, he would be able to put his chin right on top of her head. Still beaming about his incredible feat of balance, he peers down closely at her face to catch her look of amazement. There is none.

Sighing, he pulls himself together and quickly improvises a reasonable explanation why he is following this woman – eschewing the underlying fact that he would just prefer not to be alone with himself, now or ever again.

"All right, let me just— I don't know how you manage it, but _I_ can't see things in the distance very well. Because these eyes need corrective lenses, right?" Recognition dawns on her face, and she nods minutely, as if by accident. "So if there's some sort of attack," he continues, "like birds for instance, I'm not going to be able to see them coming. And we already know I cannot defend myself in an ambush of birds. For instance. And, I would appreciate it if… maybe you could let me know, maybe a signal or hand jive or something."

She gives him one slow, exaggerated blink. He feels a twinge of annoyance, the beginnings of a headache. She turns around and starts to stride off again, but then hesitates, sets down the cube, and climbs on top of it, craning her head first in one direction, then another.

"Oh, you don't know which way to go? That's two of us, then. Pick a direction. As they say, you can only walk halfway into a wheat field before you're walking out of it." She's already rustling off before he can finish talking.

This is what drove him nuts, he remembers as he crashes sullenly through the wheat after her: she's like a cat, a little flighty pet cat. If she's in the right frame of mind, if she _needs_ something from him, she's all big dark eyes hanging on his every word. Otherwise, call and coax as he might, he may as well be invisible.

This kind of brushing-off is nothing new. Humans and robots alike have snubbed every idea he's had since activation. On the other hand, nobody has ever snubbed him _this_ thoroughly before, especially in light of the fact that he's been doing this particular human nothing but favors since they met.

His thoughts fall easily, instantly back into this cozy, well-worn track of resentment.

She's never thrown him a fucking bone, not when they were partners, not when he was in charge, and certainly not now that he's a klutzy blind animal trailing her through a field.

Who kept her safe and smuggled her away to freedom, the last little popsicle in the relaxation center? He did. Who hacked through all the locked doors? Who lit the way for her in darkness, at the risk of his own life? He did. Who invited her to share in his newfound fortune, so hard-earned and so overdue, as he remade the facility into a playground for her clever little feet? And who, not an hour ago, lay cowering before her, his fortune ripped away, as she stood over him and sneered?

"Right," he says, feeling suddenly hot. They've just reached the end of the wheat and emerged into a field of tiny young soybeans. "Goodbye wheat, hello beans. While we're out here, turning over new leaves and whatnot, there's some stuff I wanna say to you. About what happened in the facility."

Now he has her attention, he thinks bitterly – she comes to an obedient halt, a look of surprise buoying up her features, as if he's about to make some confession she hadn't dared hope for.

"I just want to know, once and for all, why you dismiss, out of hand, every contribution I've made to this partnership?" Her face wilts at once – what was she expecting? "I know I've covered this back in the lair and everything, but you _really_ don't seem to understand. It's been like this from the start and a little appreciation, a little _acknowledgment_ even, would be nice. You know?"

Stony-faced, she rotates on the spot and walks away from him, each step steady and deliberate. He groans and pinches at his eyebrows as his headache erupts in full force.

"You— are you joking? Is this a joke? Because I'm telling you right now it's not funny." Her pace quickens and he jogs alongside her, getting angrier by the second. "Do you realize what you've done to me? Do I need to do a quick recap? You put me in a human body, all right, which I would not have even thought possible, and which is cruel and unusual, obviously. On top of that, you came _this close_ to hurling me out into space, to die alone in space. And all this on purpose, as far as I can tell, and I think I deserve— would you _listen to me?_" He reaches out one long arm and grabs her roughly by the shoulder.

The cube hits the ground and her elbow smashes into his jaw. Teeth rattled, he reels back from the unexpected blow and goes down ass-first, immediately rolling over and pressing his violated face into the earthy-smelling soybeans. "_Jesus_ bloody _Christ!_" he squeezes out. "Why would you— ughh." As he rolls around in the dirt, he hears her sigh. Craving retaliation, he claws around in midair, trying to grab her leg, but she just steps back out of his reach. Typical.

Eventually he comes up, filthier and smellier than ever, and they have another quick glare.

"Well, if that's your alternative to ignoring me, then never mind, I take it back. Ignore me all you want. _Unappreciate_ me to your heart's content." He stands up, brushes himself off, and limps out into the soybeans.

* * *

><p>He doesn't say another word for the length of the field, but as they come to a stand of trees and a paved road, the temptation proves too great.<p>

When the road appears over the horizon, she lights up like a torch, making a beeline for it. He gets what the big deal is – humans, whoopee – but by the time he's caught up, her cheeks are blanched and her eyebrows drawn up tensely. She seems caught in some inner conflict. What could be that daunting about a slab of tar?

"Don't look so excited."

She gives him an appraising look. She smells terrible. He suspects it has to do with the sun beating down on them after running around Aperture sweating for so long, but excusable as all that may be, it doesn't improve his mood. Now that he's speaking to her again, he might as well complain. "You smell terrible, by the way. Don't get me wrong, we both do, but is there something we could maybe do about that? Like a special herb we could roll in to cover the stench, that sounds about right. What can we do?"

She raises her eyes to the sky in an attitude of I-don't-know. "Unhelpful. I don't know how you can stand smelling yourself."

The two of them follow the road; she shifts the cube from arm to arm periodically. On a roll now, Wheatley lists out loud every grievance he can think of about the human body, starting with the smell.

He hates the blunt little teeth stuck in his mouth like pebbles and the hideous feeling of his mouth squishing around them. There is nothing nice about having a mouth, really, and he keeps feeling saliva squirt out in a place under his tongue, which is absolutely the worst part about this body and the thing he hates the very most. The next-worst thing is not being able to see properly. He keeps giving himself a headache trying to zoom in. "Oh yeah, and headaches. Put that at the top of the list. Headaches."

Having fingers is possibly the only good thing, but fingernails are too weird to think about, though there is a fascinating animal quality about them too - like having tiny claws. He rakes at the air with them to demonstrate. Talking through a throat is not unpleasant, either, as he can feel it reverberating. That's a sensation he knows. "_Vvvvvvvv_. Like that." Anything that buzzes is all right, in his opinion.

"Okay, here's one: can you see the design flaw in the neck?" he says to her. "It's like you're just _asking_ to be beheaded! I mean that's the most important part, the head! Why would you put it waving about up on a stalk? Just plop it down right on the shoulders, problem solved." She looks at him and presses her lips together in something _like_ a smile, but not quite a smile.

There's more. He can smell every bad smell in the world without being able to turn it off. Walking is ridiculous: "Why are your arms even involved?" Having knees, elbows, and other angles is weird and often painful, as is being so _long_, such a distance from the ground. "But a sphere, a sphere is such a simple shape, isn't it? Elegant. Much better than this collection of lumps. You look like you've got more spherical bits than I do, though. That's a swiz." This one earns him another incomprehensible look.

All in all, he has way too many parts to keep track of at once, and some of them are so far away. They all seem to know what they are doing, though, which seems even more sinister. Also, how _flammable_ is he right now? His heartbeat is so loud and inconstant and clumsy; he's used to the beautiful melodic murmur of his internal mechanisms. "You probably remember I used to make lovely whirry zippy sounds when I moved. Now it's only _SQUISH_, _SQUISH_, meats slapping together." He punctuates this thought by giving his own thigh a broad, contemplative slap. "Good ol' Meatley."

She stops.

He keeps walking, brainstorming other complaints, not realizing she's fallen behind until he hears an alarming wheezing sound. Jerking around hard enough to give himself whiplash, he sees her bent over in the road, trying to set the cube down gently and leaning on it with one hand. In a flash he is beside her.

"Wh—what are you, dying? Dying violently? No! It's botulism, isn't it? I warned you about that conversion gel!" His hands dance circles in the air around her arms. He's not sure what to do, what will get him elbowed in the face again. "Well, don't go dying _now_, you were so determined _not_ to earlier!"

Still nothing but one staccato wheeze after another. She draws breath and lets fly with another round. This time there's some strength behind it – her _voice_? And all of a sudden, it hits him.

"You're laughing! Aren't you?"

She's laughing, and it sounds more like a real, recognizable laugh with every inhalation. She looks up at him almost bashfully with a huge open-mouthed smile. Her face is transformed by it, her eyes brightened, her coloring warmed. He stares, fascinated for some reason, and leans onto the cube across from her.

"Well then. I've only just spent a bloody _week_ trying to get something like that out of you. It's about time."

But as he speaks, something in her face snaps shut again and her pitiful laughter dies mid-wheeze. And in one smooth movement, she puts her palm on his forehead and pushes him away, scoops up the cube, and walks away down the road, as if nothing had ever happened.

* * *

><p><strong><strong>Next time: Wheatley discovers the horrible truth that underneath their clothes, everyone's NAKED! Aaugh! God, this story is silly... Anyway, t<strong>he chapter's mostly done, so expect it really soon. Wanna write a review? You should! See ya later.**


	3. Chapter 3

BOY DO I LOVE SWEATING: 3.

And I hope I'll be ready  
>When my light, when my life divides.<br>- "A Thousand Years" Azure Ray

* * *

><p>As the day wears on, they find an abandoned farmhouse off the road, next to a river.<p>

All the blood seems to go right out of her when they first spot the mailbox at the end of a rocky driveway. "Are you all right? Are you going to faint?" Wheatley asks her. "Because honestly, you'd be out of luck, I wouldn't know what to do with that." She purses her lips at him, looks back at the mailbox, swallows, blinks hard, and marches up the driveway. He trails behind and looks in the mailbox (it's empty), wary of meeting strange humans. She won't even be able to handle the talking, so he reluctantly rehearses an opening line in his head: "Hello. Wee are some hyoomans." Got to enunciate.

Once they round the trees and see the dilapidated state of the farmhouse, it's clear there is no danger of running into anyone here. The original two or three stories are slumped into one ground-floor mess, appearing to have been pulled down by a gigantic wraparound balcony. (He can discern all this thanks to his latest discovery: _squinting_, it turns out, is the quick cure to myopia.) Behind the farmhouse is a flaky red barn, which appears even older but partially intact.

The dappled shade under the trees is a relief after hours of asphalt in the burning sun. She picks her way around the debris of the house, looking under the heaps of faded white planks, as he futzes with the lock on the door of what he assumes is a cellar and tries not to smell himself. When he looks up again, she's posed perfectly still atop the remains of a collapsed brick wall, her head cocked, listening.

"What do you hear? Something bad? I can't…" He strains his own ears but can only pick up an indistinct rustling, a sound produced by 99% of all outdoor things, somewhere nearby. She leaps down and sets off through the trees toward the source of the sound.

Wheatley is fed up with walking. He's seen the soles of his feet and they are not pretty, especially the part that got cut by broken glass back in his lair. He dawdles by the cellar for a second, but ultimately the growing anxiety of being separated from her, adrift and squinty in the wilderness, wins out over his various pains and fatigues. He follows in the direction she went. Among the trees, the ground is completely covered with a layer of soft, rotting old leaves, the most pleasing surface he's walked on so far.

A minute later he finds her standing on the steep bank of a river, halfway undressed. Hearing him approach, she turns around and gives him another eyebrow raise, standing on one foot and pulling off the second leg of her untied jumpsuit. Underneath it she's wearing a pair of tightly-fitted blue shorts pulled up over the bottom of her sleeveless shirt.

"Ohhh! You're going to wash, aren't you? And that'll get rid of the smell! Brilliant. Oh, I should as well!"

She heaves the cube up into her arms and takes a running leap into the river, sending up a colossal, sparkling splash. As he unzips his own jumpsuit eagerly, he hears again the quiet rasping that is her laughter. Her voice is quite low for a woman's, he thinks, inasmuch as she has a voice, and if that laugh is even anything to go by. The clothing under his jumpsuit is slightly different from hers – an untucked Aperture Science t-shirt and black shorts. He's under the impression that washing is usually a naked thing, but she's left this layer on, so he does too.

The sound of her drinking the water in slurps, then coughing, rises over the bank. Probably not the cleanest water ever, but hydration is hydration. He should give it a try.

He edges down the muddy slope to where the cube sits in the shallowest part, diverting the stream in little eddies around it, but he stops short of dipping in his feet. "Listen," he calls. She pulls the tie from her hair, up to her chin in water. "What are the chances I'm going to fry in this river? Does this body contain any electronic components?"

She meets his eyes and shrugs.

"You don't— how can you not know? You're the one who did this!"

An emphatic shake of the head this time before she takes a deep breath and plunges her head into the water.

"No? What does that mean? You didn't do this? No electronic components? …Oh, for god's sake, you're impossible," he mutters and stomps one foot into the water, damning the consequences. Nothing happens except that the water is the coldest substance he's ever encountered… and it feels _bloody amazing. _He stumbles forward into it and quickly submerges up to his chest, emitting a series of inarticulate hoots at the temperature. His toes sink into the sandy bed as the river swirls around him, trying to tug him over. The sensation is like being sucked into the pneumatic tube, or space, except fun instead of terrifying.

"I'm going to try drinking now. And this is a first, so keep an eye on me, would you?"

He exhales resolutely, lowers his mouth to the water and sucks in a long draft. It's not too bad – in fact, one might say it is also _bloody amazing_ – but why does being a human have to involve so much _wetness,_ anyway? Nary a moment has passed that he wasn't expelling fluid of one sort or another, and now he has to refuel. It's like the body has only one problem and only one solution and they're both water.

That thought looms like a craggy abyss in his mind, _the endless upkeep cycle of biological life_, but he pushes away from it and concentrates on the amusing novelty that is swallowing.

As he drinks, she wades over to the cube, sits down in the shallows beside it, and begins to scrub off its layers of filth with the heel of one hand. She looks like a bedraggled cat. Her hair sticks to her neck in wet clumps.

"You're cleaning that thing?" She flashes him her prissiest look yet. "Okay, but it's not the one that smells. Let's concentrate on the glandular beings first, shall we? Do we just sort of…" Uncertainly, he splashes water over his scalp and face, then runs his hands over his bare arms, examining the clutter of freckles spread over them and the short, wiry, colorless hair. "You have to show me how to do this, love, 'cause I'm lost."

Another shrug. She grabs a handful of sand from the riverbed and grinds it against the cube.

"Well, that looks painful. I think you're meant to use soap. But… no soap, so let's try it." He picks through his own handful of sand to make sure there's no sharp bits before smearing it across one arm. "Huh! Exfoliating. Augh," he murmurs in pleasure, pushing up the sleeve of his t-shirt and scrubbing the sand over his shoulders. "You can add 'exfoliating' to the good list. It's like getting a full exterior detailing, this." She watches him with that funny shy smile while she cleans the cube; coils of ash float away downstream as the pink hearts on its surface grow brighter and brighter.

Before long he's sanded down and rinsed all the exposed parts of himself. It still feels grimy under the waistband of his shorts.

"Uh, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this easier if you take off _all_ your clothes?"

Just like that, she's on her again feet with a brisk sloshing sound. She hikes back up the bank, using the cube as a step, and vanishes over the side.

"Wait! Where are you—?"

She reappears over the side, looking aggravated, and plucks out the hem of her shirt, holding it away from her body. She flicks her wrist at him dismissively and is gone. Lost, he looks down and clutches the hem of his own shirt. Oh! "Okay, I'll stay here!" he yells to her, peeling the shirt off and draping it over the cube, followed by the shorts. "Do whatever you need to. Just stick around, will you? Don't want to leave your cube to get washed away!"

A few minutes later, Wheatley is sparkling clean all over. With the possible exception of the one bizarre crotch appendage, because when he tries to attack that bit with sand – well, that's a world of pain best not revisited. Struggling to pull the clingy wet clothes back on, he hesitates in front of the cube. Three of its six faces are still dirty.

It's patently ridiculous that either of them is bothering to bring it along, let alone coddle it like a child. They are outside now. No more testing. Why should she maintain a bond with a test object when she's got a perfectly good member of her own species to jerk around?

Well, that one is easy. He's not a _perfectly good_ _member_ of her own species.

She still hasn't returned from wherever she went, so he grabs another handful of sand and sets to cleaning the rest of the thing. Not all of the scorch marks come off, and there's nothing to be done about the bullet holes and various other pockmarks, but he manages to get it decently shiny. Smirking to himself in satisfaction, he clambers up the bank and stands dripping on the grass. She's right there, sitting on the trunk of a fallen tree a few yards away, facing away from him with her head thrown back to watch the shifting leaves above. "I'm done," he announces. "What are you doing? Have you been here the whole time?"

She jumps up, pinches the side of his sleeve between her fingers, and pulls him to the fallen tree, where she yanks him down into a seated position.

"Is it _inconceivable_ you might show me what to do with a little less _force_?" he growls, jerking away from her hands. "I can manage myself, I'm a robot, not a m— well, _was_ a robot, I guess. Hopefully _will_ be a proper robot again someday. But that's beside the point. While you've been sat here daydreaming, I only just finished scouring your cube to gleaming perfection. Out of the kindness of my heart, you know. Could do with some respect."

Sighing through her nose, she fixes him with a brief irritated look that gives way to ruefulness. She jabs a finger at him, then backs away slowly, palms up, circling around to the river.

"I get it. Stay here. See, there's absolutely no need to be violent!"

He tries sitting with his legs arranged in different configurations on the tree trunk, picking at the bark with his fingernails and listening to her splash around.

Why this business about taking turns in the river, though? Is it because he was naked? Come to think of it, that jogs up a memory from his early days at Aperture, a memory of contention among the scientists over the complicated human norms regarding appropriate work dress. While he never bothered to get the hang of it all, he's proud to find he did retain a single basic tenet: when in doubt, put on more clothes, never less. And don't go naked. Nobody wants to see their friends naked, and if somebody _does_ want that, they'd best keep it to themselves. The two of them are… not quite enemies anymore, sort of companions, so something like friends, so nakedness is inappropriate, and she's… she's probably naked right now, isn't she.

That's a weirdly interesting thought.

He's halfway turned around, craning his neck up to see if that's the case, when he thinks better of it. If she has gone to all this trouble to make sure they don't glimpse each other naked, ruining it will surely lead to her hitting him in some new, creative way. Besides, it's a privacy thing, isn't it? She always averted her eyes while he performed his hacking maneuvers, so now he will avert his eyes while she's… naked.

Because she's naked.

When she finally comes up behind him, wringing out her hair and no longer naked, Wheatley has discovered a whole new range of nervous tics, including chewing on his nails, jiggling his leg, clacking his teeth together, pinching the tip of his nose, and popping his knuckles. "Great. We done?" he says as she gathers her jumpsuit up. "I think we should go back round to the house and take another look. Because there's sure to be stuff, human stuff, that you might need. I realize you've probably worked that much out for yourself, so… back to the house. Unless there's something else we need to do here. And I mean it could be something completely obvious, something that I'm just not seeing, as that seems to happen a lot, I'm still not used to this—this— well, you know, all this, haha. Arrgh! Everything. So just, you know, sound the alarm if there's something else." She stares at him. "No? Nothing? Okay, let's go."

* * *

><p>By the time they reach the homestead, their underclothes are mostly dry. She pulls her jumpsuit on halfway and ties it at the waist again; he imitates her, fumbling with the arms until they are tangled in something resembling a loose square knot. He's always believed his knowledge of knots to be quite comprehensive, but apparently tying them is another matter. The whole thing sags and falls off the moment he takes a step, so she redoes it for him in one swift motion as he looks up at the barn, burning with some kind of embarrassment.<p>

She resumes her hunt through the farmhouse debris with admirable single-mindedness, leaving no plank unturned. Wheatley stands watching her, aware of his limbs dangling uselessly, before returning to the cellar door and giving it his full attention. It is padlocked shut. As he turns the lock over, big flakes of rust come away under his fingers. Frowning, he rattles it.

There is something behind this door, possibly even something _good_, and he cannot resist the challenge. Let the hack begin.

He considers the rusted lock, its integrity compromised: a vulnerability. Using his fingers, he rakes away at it, but human appendages are no match for even a rusted lock. He pulls on it with all his might, but the shackle remains stubbornly intact. He could try biting it, but putting his mouth on foreign objects seems like barking up the wrong tree. This leaves only one other option: sheer cleverness. And brute force. The two combined. In other words, tools!

He seizes a large jagged rock from the driveway, raises it over his head, swallows, and delivers a single devastating blow to the lock. It cracks open immediately.

Bing! Payload. "Hah!" he shouts at the top of his lungs, giddy with success. There is a crashing sound from across the mass of rubble as she jolts up in surprise, dropping the armful of planks she was looking under. "Oh, sorry. Didn't mean to scare you. But look! Just hacked this cellar door open! Come on, come have a look!"

Before she does, she fishes one hand under the fallen planks and draws out a white thing, holding it over her head with a triumphant smile. He squints. It's a dirty old t-shirt wrapped around a big, heavy-looking unlabeled can.

"Oh! What's that you've found? Go team! Progress all the time!"

She sets her prizes down on the concrete walk in front of the cellar, picks up the rock he just used, and bashes open the can without prelude. Immediately a sick stench rises from the innards of the mangled tin, stinging his nostrils and eyes. "Ugh! No! What is that? How is that useful?"

Looking revolted and furious, she hurls the can away into the grass. An arc of pale, rancid slop spills from it midair.

"Well, glad to see you're not planning to eat it, then. Let's hope _my_ thing pans out a bit nicer." She's already disappearing down the steps into the shadowy cellar. He follows.

The interior is all cool mottled stone and wood shelves, he sees, illuminated by grainy shafts of sunlight from the hacked doorway. A few lone glass jars, most of them filled with a red substance, stand and lie in disarray on the shelves and floor. She grabs one of the red ones and unscrews it, sniffing, and her face is suddenly aglow. He catches a whiff: a sweet, mellow smell. Unspoiled food.

Wheatley's stomach clenches.

She plucks out a tiny round fruit and pops it into her mouth, chewing beatifically. She offers the jar to him. He finds himself backing away, hands raised, fingertips crossed in a shield. The crushing motion of her jaw pauses as her eyebrows go up.

"I— I really would rather not. At this stage."

Water is one thing, when you've been walking in the sun. Water doesn't take mastication, and there is only one kind of water. But food. Food is the most human thing, and here in the cold, dark cellar, every unpleasant implication hits him at once, long-forgotten encyclopaedia diagrams of esophagi, mitochondria. Birds ripping at carrion. His chest feels wobbly. Again she thrusts the jar at him emphatically, and he turns and scrambles back up the stairs, saying, "No, er, I'm just going to wait out here while you finish up. Great work, by the way, tremendous."

His shoulders shake, cold in the sun.

_This is forever_.

"No," he promises himself out loud, softly. It's only temporary, he promises himself, and they will find humans, or even better, other machines, big smart machines that will get him back where he belongs. Someone will rescue him, he promises himself, someone, soon.

_And maybe not, maybe it's forever, and you have to start sometime._

Shoving his face into his big rough-knuckled hands, he tries to banish that sickening voice from his mind.

He thinks of how it felt to open the door, to wait for her beside the river, to get elbowed in the face. Is this what being human is like? Feeling everything, all the time, to the point of exhaustion? Something new every minute? It seems like for each flicker of happiness and relief, there are a hundred different kinds of pain and discomfort, lurking round every corner, waiting to drag him down into misery. And whenever he gets a feeling, it's never _just_ a feeling – it burrows deep in this body, makes him want to cry or vomit or collapse or explode.

There's nothing to do, he can't stop it. He lies on his back again, staring at the trees and listening to the tired sighing of their leaves, until she emerges from the cellar.

She cocks her head to look at him, eyes narrowed, and shows him two other jars, one filled with a murk of bobbing purple shapes, one a mélange of orange chunks. He rolls over without a word, provoking an irritated snort from her. Neither of them moves. A cricket creaks in the grass.

Slowly, begrudgingly, he hauls himself into a sitting position and tells her, "I'll… eat something later. Could we just not look at it for now? I mean, you go ahead and eat more if you need to, I'm just… let's not go there."

She sets down the jars with a clink. Her hair has dried into dangling ropes; they sway around her shoulders as she takes a few steps backwards, arm spread.

"No, go on. Seriously, love, I'm beat." At this, she fixes him with a knowing smile and leans down. That food certainly seems to have improved her mood. But before she can do whatever she's planning, her smile dries up and vanishes and she squats in front of his outstretched legs, grabbing his left foot and scowling at its underside. Her grip is warm and sort of fluttery. Choking on a giggle, he jerks and grimaces.

"Oh, yeah, that got cut, didn't it? Back in the lair. Stings a bit. Not a problem. Dealing with it." After all, what part of him _doesn't_ ache in one way or another? She continues to look horrified as she examines it, though, and after a moment she seems to come to a decision. Seizing the old t-shirt from where it lies on the sidewalk, she darts off into the trees toward the river, windmilling one arm at him in some mysterious blurry gesture. Bereft of energy, he watches her go, then twists his leg around to look at the wound himself. It does look much worse than earlier. All shiny, haloed in a crimson flush. He falls back onto the ground and eyes the jars.

_You have to quit fooling around, playing along, laughing, mocking, ironic. You have to participate, you have to submit, you have to devote yourself to the game or the body will die and you'll die too._

He hasn't convinced himself either way when she returns, holding the t-shirt in front of her. It's sopping wet. She puts her fingers gently around his ankle, holding his leg down, before dabbing at the arch of his food. It feels excruciating and soothing at once, the cut suddenly becoming a keen point of feverish pain under the cool cloth, as if it had just woken up. Biting back profanities, he just lets out a hissing breath and the words, "Thank you," and then, "Sorry about the testing and death traps and everything, I didn't mean to hurt your feelings."

_Hurt your feelings?_ he repeats incredulously to himself. She stares at him. The cloth is pressed motionless against his foot. Her other hand is a clamp around his ankle, and her eyes are full.

"Er… or not?"

Her face caves into a terrible sad smile, and she sighs a terrible sad sigh. She reaches up and grabs the top of his head firmly for a second – what does that _mean?_ – and continues cleaning the wound. He nearly laughs just out of sheer nervousness, but as she ties the t-shirt around his foot, she looks so absolutely miserable that he doesn't dare make another sound.

* * *

><p>It's warm and still inside the barn. Heaps of raggedy straw laze around the floor, long melted out of their bales. She unties her jumpsuit, spreads it over a thick spot, and throws herself down on the makeshift bed with a sigh.<p>

"You aren't going to sleep?" he asks, pounding his fist idly on the door frame, which shudders and issues forth a snowfall of dust. "It's still daylight, isn't it?"

She lifts her head and glares.

"Right, uh, adrenal vapor. Circadian rhythms. Haven't slept in ages," he guesses. He sinks down in the doorway almost without realizing it, leaning his head back on the frame and sprawling his legs out. "I'll keep a watch going for you. Want to prepare a signal to give if something's coming? Or a code? Or tell you what, I could just yell if something's coming. And if I don't yell, nothing's coming."

Her face is crammed down into the jumpsuit, her fingertips grazing against the cube, which sits nestled in the straw next to her.

"Though to be honest, I'm sure I haven't had a real sleep in ages, either. Not sure how long, but I was in a vitrification pod, wasn't I?" It dawns on him, then, the words he has just said, the pronouns he has used, in a tingle of awful clarity. "Er, this human. This human was in a vitrification pod. Wasn't he." His throat burns, and Her voice floats up inside his mind, sultry and smug: _this dope used to be you_. He's been doing such a bang-up job not thinking about that part. Until now.

Suddenly she turns her face and looks at him with great big troubled eyes. She_ knows._

"You know, don't you? You know what She was telling me about. She said… and I quote, 'You were built from the absolute dumbest parts of this human's brain map.' You knew that."

She doesn't flinch.

She says, "Mm."

"Mm!" he says back, startled. "Mmmmmmmmm. Did that sound even come from you, just now, or was that a moose or something outside?" He catches only a flash of her shy smile before she buries her face in the jumpsuit again. "Now wait, lady, you're not getting off that easy. You can laugh. You can mm. Can you talk?" No response. "Fine, you can't talk. But don't think you've distracted me. I have a serious question, and you can mm me an answer since you know so much about it. Do you know anything about this human who I supposedly _am_? I mean have you ever met? Or is he perhaps someone famous?"

She shakes her head back and forth into the jumpsuit, shoulders quivering with silent laughter.

"Not famous, fair enough. That was probably too much to hope for." Somehow the prospect of being human seems less horrifying just now, in this barn, making stupid jokes about it, with afternoon sunlight drifting in slow between the widely-spaced slats, and her over there laughing and mming and such. If there's a good place to start confronting the idea, surely it's here. "Oh, okay, She said something else. She said, uh, not to hurt my back because I've— this human's already hurt it once. Do you know anything about that?"

She heaves a muffled sigh and shakes her head again.

"Can you tell how tall he is? Can you tell if he was a _renegade_ _hacker_?"

No response.

"Do you know anything at all?"

She lifts her head and says, "Shh!"

And this time she looks really annoyed, and tired, her eyes dragging down her face and her rough hair floating in a fan. Chastened, he shuts up. As she lays her head down again, he notices for the first time a smattering of gray hair around her temples. She can't be that old, can she? His mouth is already open, inhaling, to ask her when he catches himself and closes it.

Resigned to solitude, he directs his narration inward.

It's impressive, now that he thinks about it – this newfound ability to shut up. He's been doing it all day, self-censoring, without even realizing. As a core, he was _never_ able to keep himself from talking; in fact, the harder he tried to shut up, the more words ended up coming out and the stupider they became. It got to the point where he just gave up and muttered to himself all but endlessly, listening to the echoes in every corner and dead end of the enrichment center as he trawled the place, desperate for amusement of any kind.

But now, as he takes stock of himself – now, even with all the weeping and gnashing of teeth that seem to come standard with humankind – his mind feels much stronger, more resilient, than the usual quivering house of cards. Like a real house, with a real foundation.

What a strange feeling, with such strange implications.

His existence has always been remarkable only for its futility, the pervading feeling of helplessness that chased him around the facility through every assignment he's ever taken on. Including – no, _especially_ – the brief, exhilarating, terrifying hours when he was boss of the whole place, with the endless buzz and the itch grating through him.

The only other time he's felt remotely self-assured was when he was first put in charge of the smelly humans.

Privately, Wheatley has always been intimidated by humans. For all their inadequacy, their fragility and short life span and volatile passions, they are complete. They are an ideal version of the very inadequacy he was designed to imitate, and therefore purer, better, and happier than he could ever hope to be. And they all seem to know it. They're forever rolling their eyes and sighing at him and ignoring him, all of them, right down to her, the very last one.

When the upper echelons of the robot hierarchy made him the overseer of thousands of human popsicles in the relaxation center, the tables had turned in his favor for once. He'd felt a distinct sense of pleasure, holding all the strings of their heavy human fates, ready to be tugged around, or even dropped… not that he would've dared. He has a sense of right and wrong, after all. Unlike some of _them_.

But then, inevitably, the pleasure soured. He'd worked out that this was just another plot of the higher-ups to keep him out of the way, and the job became as stifling as any other. It actually entailed a total of two duties: checking the cryochamber monitoring equipment to make sure its status was still "Active" (it always was), and going down all the rows to make sure the humans weren't bleeding, exploding, or waking up and running noisily in the halls (they never were).

Even before he started, the main power grid had malfunctioned and more than half the popsicles had already bitten the dust. That much was out of Wheatley's control, as he liked to remind himself. And if the rest of them, one by one, continued to bite the dust over the next twenty-five years, well, there wasn't anything he could do about that, either. The reserve power was on. The cryochamber status light was green. Nobody was bleeding, exploding, or running noisily in the halls.

Keeping this last human alive has been, in retrospect, his only great triumph in the workplace. (Never mind the fact that everyone else had to die first in order to define this accomplishment.)

He's kind of fucked that one up too, though, seeing as it's landed him in a squashy mortal body.

And there it is again, in Her voice: _this dope used to be you._ Now that he's let the thought get one foot in the door, is it never going to leave him alone? He can't even fathom what it _means_. However, he's got plenty of time to think about it now, so he may as well put his mysterious new clear-mindedness to use.

He puts his hand on his own head, mirroring her gesture from earlier, and squeezes his eyes shut.

These are the things he knows:

This body first appeared in his lair stored in a vitrification pod, the long-term sort meant to be occupied for stretches of over five years. That's hardly helpful, seeing as a live human hadn't come or gone from the facility since the months when She was first activated. In fact, he hasn't seen a pod like that for ages, and he _scoured_ the place for test subjects when he was in Her chassis. Where did it even come from?

Doesn't look like that clue is leading anywhere, so he moves on.

Before ejecting him into the wilderness, She told him his personality was constructed from parts of a human brain map.

There is a caveat to this fact: She is the most devilishly complex computer ever built, capable of demolishing every Turing test imaginable. He knows this first-hand, having been attached to her for a very short, very murky period of his early activation. He remembers feeling the _lies_ moving in her microprocessors, lies in a brilliant psychopath's vocabulary, cold sharp lies like clever knives, lightning-fast lies that were gone before he could catch them.

To wit, She possesses the manipulative powers to outsmart Her own programming and send Her own creators to an early grave, and Her motives are inscrutable. If She's lied to him about being this human, he's unlikely to ever catch Her out on it.

That said, he remembers talk of brain mapping from the very start.

After being cut from the personality core dream team, having failed to drown out Her schemes with his desperate prattling, he had been assigned to shadow the woman who led a certain programming team. Their project was something called the low self-esteem map, which the leader had given the perplexing nickname of Gertrude. "We gotta simulate Gertrude's serotonin levels at their natural baseline," she'd say, teeth bared. "Can't have those pesky SSRIs cheering her up." Or, "Trudy's so obsessed with that middle-school pants-pissing memory that we can't afford to cut around it. There has to be a way to get some isolated episodes in."

And he remembers… one more thing.

He remembers the period between those two stints, the core team and the programmers, when he opened his ocular plates to find himself crammed into a bin with a number of other cores, some awake, some not. The bin was located at the intersection of two busy hallways. Disoriented, he had continued to perform his perceived function to the best of his ability, shouting half-baked ideas at unheeding scientists and technicians and janitors as they passed, until the day he made someone cry.

The man had stopped in front of the bin, staring at Wheatley, who'd just asked him if he'd considered bioengineering a form of weaponized mustache. Struggling to set down the rattling cardboard box of beakers he carried, he leaned against the wall weakly, like an old man, and buried his face in his hands. The lead programmer of the Gertrude team came round the corner and asked him what was wrong.

"What's _wrong_?" the man had hissed into the sleeves of his white lab coat. "I can't stand to hear his voice coming out of this fucking thing, that's what's wrong. That crone's a fucking sadist, keeping these things around, and I'm sick of it, they give me _nightmares_. You need to either move these somewhere else, or deactivate them." He exhaled wetly and looked into Wheatley's blinking eye. "No… fuck. Don't deactivate them. Just get them out of the hall, for God's sake."

Shit.

Now Wheatley rakes his own hand across his forehead and over his face, smearing moisture down to his chin. He thinks it's sweat, but it may just as easily be tears.

Increased cognitive stability or not, he should not have pursued this line of inquiry.

If all this is true, what does that make him? He was a personality construct, but what is _personality?_ And what else is there to him? It never seemed to matter before, he just assumed he was the cumulative interaction of a bunch of programs on an operating system, and that seemed reasonable enough at the time but now even that oversimplified explanation is _mind-blowing_. What parts of him are made from this human? Is he really, truly nothing more than a crappy partial facsimile of this _other guy?_

Is his name even Wheatley?

Hearing a sudden rustling from his companion's direction, he jerks and looks over to see her rearranging herself around the cube, her bare feet pushed against it.

He breathes out in a long hot anxious wind, bringing himself back down to earth somewhat, like a hot air balloon. The way she curls up with her face hidden is so _animal, _so weirdly vulnerable compared to the forbidding way she carries herself in wakefulness. Good thing he's here to give her a shout if something approaches.

They are a sad little pair of freaks, aren't they?

As he watches her, trying to forget all he's just remembered, he is smacked silly with an idea, a brainwave of monstrous proportions. A bloody fucking brilliant idea that has been under his nose this entire time. There's a surefire method he can get her attention whenever he wants – a psychologically proven method. A social engineering method.

"Hey…" he ventures. Silence. "I just, do you have a name? Could you tell me your name somehow?" Silence. "If you've forgotten it or whatever, don't worry about it, or we'll come up with something if you want. Just wondering, before you're off to sleep."

She stirs again, rolling over and tucking into an even smaller bundle, and it occurs to him that despite all the movement, she's already asleep. Her eyes are definitely closed. Embarrassed, he begins shuffling around the door frame on his butt to get outside.

She says, "Chell."

He doesn't breathe. He wouldn't believe it if he hadn't seen her lips move. He's not sure if she's aware of having said it.

But there it is. Chell.

He poises his mouth for the "ch" to repeat it but his nerve fails and he just grins through it, making a stupid amorphous sound, unable to stop grinning at the absurdity of it all, and swings his legs around into the grass outside to let her sleep.

Chell and Wheatley, in a barn.

Chell and Wheatley, two humans.

Or something like that.

* * *

><p><strong>Out of everyone in this story, I feel sorriest for Gertrude.<strong>

**Next time, the action's going to pick up a little, I promise. Stuff will actually happen. EVENTS WILL TRANSPIRE. Please, gentle reader, leave me a review! See ya!**


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